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judgecorp writes "EcoATM is going to install machines which give money for old phones across the U.S. The system, shown at CES, takes a photo of any phone or other gadget put in its tray, and provides a data cable (for every kind of phone?) to check it is working. The machine offers a quote based on the current used price, and pays up on the spot."

Actually there's only about a dozen connectors that work with 99% of the phones available in the US the last ten years. If the cord doesn't work then the phone is likely too old to be of any use anyway.

But what prevents theft? Steal an iPhone, slip it in the machine and instant money! Currently you have to wait hours to find a craigslist buyer or pawn it fast but at least the phone is still there for recovery. I'm sure you can't open it to see if your stolen phone is in there so you'll never know.

These machines are not going to hand out cash like an ATM, because they'd have to be refilled and they'd have to be more secure.

The machines will probably require you to insert an ATM card or credit card, so your identity will be associated with the transaction and the stolen phone you just tried to sell it. Even better, maybe they'll give you a coupon or "gift card" good for 10% off a new phone (upon activation of 2 year contract).

Eventually, the penalty for selling a stolen phone to this machine will be death, because you tried to take money from a corporation. Stealing the phone itself will carry a penalty of a $5 fine because all you did was steal from a human being.

dunno, the vid I saw few months ago, hell, maybe even 8 months+ ago, about these things looked like they'd be placed in places like atm would be placed into. the place would be secure. it would have to be like that anyways, with some human on some desk seeing what's happening. otherwise you could screw with them, cut the connectors etc vandalism.

but would you insert your debit or credit card into any machine that claimed to give you money?

I do several times a week. They're called "ATMs" and they seem to work pretty well. Just pop that sucker in there, type in a PIN number (mine is 1234) and then hit the Fast Cash, $100 button on the touch screen. Crisp bills come flying out. If you listen carefully, you can hear the machine licking it's robotic thumb as it snaps off those five double-sawbucks like a pimp at a rolling crap game.

But what prevents theft? Steal an iPhone, slip it in the machine and instant money!

Instant pocket money. It will pay a scrap dealer's price, probably a few dollars. Better than nothing, but you'd be a fool to use it for a working (stolen) iPhone. It's meant as alternative to just binning it.

We have a local electronics scrap dealer. He paid me $2 for my old 17" CRT monitor, still on working order. Cost about $200 new, 10 years ago. But I didn't need it and after a week advertising it online, clearly no one else did either, so it was literally $2 or nothing, and at least it'll get recycl

You got $2 for an old CRT? Around here, you generally have to pay the recyclers to take the things off your hands. While they may have valuable materials in them, it costs more to extract them (safely) than they are worth hence the reason you have to pay to recycle them. It's also illegal to throw them in the landfill, though people do it.

Also, good luck selling one. If it is in good working order, is clean, and is a high end screen like a Sony Trinitron you might be able to get someone to take it

No kidding. I'd suggest holding the phones for at least one month before they're allowed to be processed. That being said, I'm sure someone could find a way to make this work without running into the theft issue.

What happens if my phone is stolen and someone tries to cash it in?ecoATM kiosks have a variety of features in place specifically to deter stolen phones from entering our system. These features include the ability to capture;Drivers License or Govt IDCredit cardDigital signatureFingerprintPicture / Video of consumer via webcamAddress & emailDate & location of transactionDetails of what was collected, including the serial numberecoATM kiosks are also capable of refusing to transact any phones found in the databases that tract reported stolen phones.

Presumably which ones are actually used will vary from country to country and according to the agreement with the retailer who hosts the unit.

I'm sure the determined thief can find their way around these. But then they can already sell to a pawn broker or on ebay. A few of the dumber criminals might get caught.

Criminals aren't just dumb, some really don't give a rats ass about being identified. If they can run in, collect cash, and scram in less than a minute, it would be a productive day for them. Evidence and whatnot is meaningless as it only addresses the issue after the crime has already happened. So unless this only activates after performing a DB lookup of a citizen, there's nothing to prevent someone forging a false ID.

I think the root problem with this idea is the fact it's offering instant cash. Why in s

In the cashless society you put forward, how would individuals pay other individuals?

Everyone would be forced to have a bank account. In the event no bank wants you as a customer, the individual's last option is to have an account with the Federal Government. Only this account wouldn't provide any other services or payback on interest. To the citizen, a Federal account is nothing more than a financial holding tank. Equivalent to a virtual wallet or safe.

Trading on the inertia of Square Enix's Final Fantasy brand, I guess. If you meant some other Square, I don't know because Wikipedia has been shut down. Hopefully I'll have a more thoughtful reply tomorrow.

"Square charges a fee of 2.75% on every credit card transaction." This is in addition to the roughly $350 per year that I'd have to pay to upgrade from a $7 per month* dumbphone to a $35 per month** smartphone capable of running the application.

> Sometime in the future, it's quite possible that we will live in a cashless society. Lord knows the Federal Gov want's to tract each and every transaction. It would cut down on violent crime, drug abuse, and prevent tax evasion. It would also save by not having the Treasury create physical currency. It would also allow them to inject more money (inflation) in real-time into the system via a few keystrokes sort of speak.

Um,... good?

The first thing that occurs to me is that the very first thing that wil

Correct. It wasn't a typo. My bad. It's rare, but I've noticed that I will substitute the correct spelling of one word for another when they phonetically sound similar. While I do make a best effort to proofread prior to posting, I do screw up from time to time. And honestly, I try not to put too much effort into this. It is after all a public forum, not a dissertation. Life is too short. Call me lazy if you want.

PROTIP: It's not considered very nice to reply solely to correct someone's grammar or usage unless the error makes it nearly impossible to understand someone's post. I have found it more polite to include a topical reply to one's point in the same comment as your correction. It might look like the following: "I'll assume that by 'rats ass' you meant 'rat's ass', and by 'tract' you meant 'track'. In that case: Not everybody can afford [etc.]"

The obvious way of avoiding that would be to require the payments to a traceable bank account, rather than in cash. That said, most operators will flag an IMEI as stolen quite quickly, and the machine can query the IMEI quite easily. It would be easy to report all IMEIs as soon as the phone was inserted and reverse the payment if it was reported stolen within a week.

These machines will be found in shopping malls. What if the thief tries to fence the phone to a machine in the same mall as where he "found" it in a handbag? The victim may not yet know that her phone is gone, much less made a deposition at the police station and listed the IMEI...

That's why I said it would need the delay. If the payment is not cash, but some form of electronic transfer (most credit cards support payments to them as well as from) then it could be reversed if the phone is reported stolen before the period is up. If you pay into someone else's stolen credit card, then you can't get the funds, so it's not a major issue.

Also setting someone up to take the fall. If they're not complete idiots they'll demand an address to send a check to.

So, let say I want to set up AliasMrAlias and I know his address (This is 100% hypothetical, I have nothing against you, no idea where you live other than probably planet Earth, it just makes a better story). Buy a burner phone, maybe a $20 virgin mobile phone at Target or whatever. Recycle it and provide AliasMrAlias's public available address and contact information. File a police repo

The follow up to your little hypothetical story is that the police examine the video footage of the automated fencing machine, see it was you, not him that sold the phone to it, and give you (or the hypothetical individual) 5-10 for identity theft (or whatever the hell framing someone for a crime falls under). Or compare fingerprints that the machine required. Either would be pretty easy to require (via face recognition or a thumb-scanner). In any case, they certainly wouldn't take the information the selle

Not fingerprints on the phone, fingerprints recorded in the machine -- it has a scanner and requires a fingerprint from the seller (among other measures, such as scanning an ID card / driver's license). Read their FAQ.

The phone was worth more than $5 dollars. Now it is two years old and the market is flooded with old feature phones which no one wants, it actually is worth about that. Simply for parts and materials, most likely, unless it is in really good shape or a really nice feature phone.

Yes, but that may change in the future - with smartphones all popular, who wants a feature phone these days? In a year or two it'll be an iPhone 3GS that's "at the end of its life", and that'll be worth much more than $5 (or at least I should hope so)...

This is a nice idea, but surely the condition of the device matters too? I'm sure a cracked iPhone 4S wouldn't be worth as much as one in mint condition.

That's what I was thinking too, the glass might be cracked, the display broken but it could still "work" for this machine. Perhaps they will take photos as well and compare against a reference? If you control the camera, lighting, distance and have an exact model reference picture you should be able to see most kinds of visual damage...

...so I download a nice photo of a pristine iphone, print it at 1:1 scale, and paste it to the front of my broken phone.

Moreover, I'm thinking it wouldn't necessarily detect the issues with my daughter's last Galaxy S, which had a wonky (but not broken) display, dead compass, dead position sensor, and dead GPS. But still worked as a phone if you could dial blind.

One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones. Essentially its a tax dodge. Don't know how it works with separate companies or non-profit, all the donation credits in the world are useless from a tax perspective unless you have taxable profits...

The only dodge I can think of for a church would be something like take an income stream of $1M of sunday donations and 1000 junk cellphones, mark up the value of the phones to $1000 each using some windex and give them away, so you gave away $1000 * 1000 phones = $1M. Now you've got $1M cash unaccountable for, which as a good christian evangelist televangelist you can spend on cocaine and male prostitutes, in other words, blow and... blow, I guess, while publishing that you took in $1M and some phones and send out $1M and some phones so superficially there's nothing fishy going on with the finances.

Sorry for the follow up to my post but I hit post too early... the other dodge I'm aware of, is those "new" batteries on ebay actually are shipped in "new" plastic baggies, but guess where the batteries came from?

Never buy a battery (of any sort, not just cellphone) on ebay unless you see and can verify the manufacturing date code and that date isn't like 3 years old. Even if you see that, a bit of white plastic shrink wrap and a computer printed label has an excellent profit return if you sell the "new" b

Never buy a battery (of any sort, not just cellphone) on ebay. Period.

There, fixed that for you.Seriously, there's so much 'spam' on eBay, that it's become virtually worthless. The last time I tried to buy anything useful from there, I spent so much time sorting through the knockoffs, scams, idiots who put unrelated keywords in their description, etc... that ('paying' myself a fair hourly wage) I wasn't saving all that much money unless I got the item at a low price on the first auction I bid in.

One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones and prays like hell that they never get audited.

One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones and prays like hell that they never get audited.

There, fixed that for you.

Definitely - the audit will kill you. Even if they actually did something to create a phone with a "value" of $150, they can't claim that as a loss/donation when they give it away. Giving away an item does not generate a transaction on your books that you can enter into any of your expenses categories. Giving money does. The expenses associated with reconditioned the device have already been captured by you accounting system when you bought the windex and the paper-towels.

My understanding is when transferring goods to a non-profit you can write off the full original value of the merchandise. However, someone actually has to accept the goods in the first place. Obviously, you can keep junking the same place twice.

However, it's been a while since I've dealt with a non-profit, but that is what I remember anyway.

I guess they're not interested in the phone as it being a phone but in the materials that it was made up of. There's still a good amount of materials in a phone that can be recycled and sold again. They probably check if the phone still works to make sure that it isn't just an empty casing of a phone.

Here's a question: if your phone was stolen and someone showed up with it at one of these stations, which would you rather the station do:

1) Lowball the price, get the phone, notify the police, notify you and return the phone to you if you want, for a service fee (one might arrange to agree to this ahead of time when reporting the phone stolen.)

2) Tell the guy to go scram, taking your phone with him, and notify the police.

I'm pretty sure they will have considered at least some of the more obvious scams and figured out ways around them. Once your phone is inside the machine they could run some diagnostics on the screen with the data cable plugged in and scan that to ensure it's a properly working model. They could even use this opportunity to test things like the bluetooth/wifi/speakers/audio jack if those things affect the price sufficiently.

Also, given the cost of labor, I'd say you'll have a hard time getting this machine to be cheaper and less error prone than some shop clerk that does this work and checks your ID to make sure you're not anonymously selling stolen phones.

The difference is the shop clerk needs a shop to operate out of. This just needs a couple of square feet of floorspace in a mall. They could even do a deal with people who operate those change converting machines to put both systems in one (share the running costs and rental overheads for machines that probably sit unused for 90% of the time).

The recycling companies won't set up shops extra for this, but instead partner with existing shops. So, the newsstand, the photo shop, or the place where you buy new phones also takes used phones on the side.

Advantage:

no need for extra space (apart from the actual storage bin where the used phones go)

Cash on the spot? I think not...
Considering the issues of stolen devices, carrier account transfer/deactivation, forgotten SIM and purging of personal data; this is a business model that will not fly.
These are human problems that will not be easily overcome by some image acquisition and USB port hacking...
One business opportunity for this may be to create a service to collect lost phones found by a good samaritan. Insurance carriers for policies that people buy for their phone could report SNs and pay

The big complaint I have with used cellphones, at least here in the USA, is this:

Most people obtain their new phone with a 1 or 2 year contract, so the phone's price is heavily subsidized up-front. You might get a $700 phone for $200, or a $400 phone for $50. You wind up paying its full price, of course, but only as you pay your monthly bills to finish off your contract (or pay the ETF to get out of it sooner).

Problem is, the used market generally views these devices as though their actual VALUE is relative to the subsidized prices, not the TRUE prices.

As just one example? My Sprint HTC Evo 4G is just under 1 year old right now, and when I got it, it was the "rock star" of phones on the Sprint network. There was really nothing better they could sell you, even if you wanted it. Currently, Sprint has a "trade in" offer where you can send back your old phone for credit on your future bills (not even cash!), and my Evo is worth a whopping $80, if in "excellent condition". Never-mind I'm probably still paying Sprint more than that for the phone, as I use up the remainder of the 2 year contract I had with it!

And judging from my experiences with most of the "cellphone recyclers" out there I'd talked to, I suspect they pay even LESS on average. Their business models usually revolve around the idea that plenty of people value their used phones at "basically zero", considering them a waste of space, or extra junk lying around.

If you've got a plain old flip-phone of some sort (hardly matters what make, model or how new) -- because it's used and not a "smartphone", I'd say you'd be lucky to get even $5 - $10 for it from most recyclers. That's one hell of a depreciation rate, when you consider a lot of those were "military spec" Nextels and such, that their owners only recently got done paying hundreds for in their contracts.

I've consistently found I got FAR more out of semi-recent model used cellphones by reselling them on Craigslist or even eBay, vs. recycling them. People who don't want long contracts but need reliable cellular service with a major carrier quickly realize the real value of these used phones, and are essentially the only customers you'll have who'll pay you a fair price for one.

Worse yet, many providers still charge the same price even if you have a phone already you want to use on their network. If you don't take the contract phone, you're out even more money. That system doesn't make sense to me. I should get a discount because I didn't get a phone.

Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible. It always depresses me that we collect glass bottles, smash them, heat them to a high temperature, and then use the result to make... glass bottles.

>p>> Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible.

Agreed, although giving your old one to others (which I have done under specialized circumstances) sometimes means that they throw away their old phone. Or maybe they give it to someone of even less means, I dunno... it might be like that description of the city of Minas-Trony in Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings. The city was built like a layer cake, so that the rich

It's purchasing. Recycling means breaking the machine down to its components; metal, plastic etc.; then using those components to build more things.

I thought it was going to be a machine that crushes up phones and extracts the metals in a safe controlled manner, then grinds up the plastic for reuse. What was I thinking? The tech world is nothing but hype....

Oh thats cause this is not recycling, instead its a big box of working celphones with all sorts of valuable data on it, sitting in a thin box at the mall ready to steal or resale while your feeding it for free

How could I have missed this? Ye Gods, this is an automated phishing machine. I mean, us geeks, we'd do a factor reset and pull the SD card (if anything but an iPhone) but Fred and Ethyl Mertz would just drop the phone in the bin without thinking. Holy Carp! I think we just guaranteed the Russian economy for another decade.

Sadly, this was my first thought. Unless there is some sort of holding period, like with pawn shops, this could easily be abused. My second thought was issues with personal data. Will the phones be wiped when received? Or only when they are prepared to be sold. This could work, but they'd need to handle these issues, along with the others that I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Erm, for anyone who works all week and also has to commute so doesn't have time to get to the shop, and doesn't want to waste their weekend making a special journey to the shop just to sell their phone - yeah it would be nice to sell old phones in the middle of the night. After all, I can already go to supermarkets and buy phones in the middle of the night, so it's only logical.